just caught myself writing a big shiren post in games you played today and then i thought, what the hell, shiren’s one of the most important things on this sick earth, why shouldn’t this website have a thread for it. plus there’s been something in the air lately…
i would love to read talk about any other mystery dungeons too, i am thinking about looking at chocobo and torneko 2 sometime soon myself. but please know that any mention of pokemon mystery dungeon makes me sick
did everyone know that mystery dungeon was invented and piloted as the passion project of yuji horii’s own “koichi nakamura”? a man who directed a few little games such as dragon quest, dragon quest ii, dragon quest iii, and dragon quest iv? as well as a few of the early chunsoft sound novels? before getting obsessive about the torneko experiment and then moving on from the main dragon quest series to launch his opus “mystery dungeon 2: shiren the wanderer”???
just wanted to get that out of the way. this question about shiren 3 psp version is what actually set me off–
and i think it’s probably just referencing wireless psp rescue implentation in shiren 3 psp. the english wii shiren 3 has no rescues, though i think maybe the jp version did. anyway, the severely underplayed shiren 3, that’s what i’ve been playing. i might know nobody at all who’s played it for more than like two hours. great choice to start the shiren thread with, i’m sure you’ll agree. it is widely regarded as The Bad One, and it is regarded so correctly, but it has its charms. it has great world maps
unfortunately the game itself is somewhat deranged. instead of the msq being a big dungeon you dig away it it’s a series of smaller dungeons you clear one at a time. so when you’re at level 10 and you die in the fifth dungeon, you go back to the world map, and you’re still at that same dungeon, but now instead of going in at level 10 with your Stuff you have nothing, so you can’t really go in there. just kind of bewildering, obviously seems to compromise the whole mystery dungeon concept
there are two means of confronting the issue. one is that there’s a new pocket dimension dungeon you can go into from the main menu to just level up and get stuff to take back into msq, at first you can only do five floors of it at a time but it expands when you hit certain points in the game. this mostly feels like shit to even think about. the second is that when you start your file you can play on normal diffuclty or the new “easy mode”; the only change easy mode makes is that if you die in msq you just load your save back up from right before you entered the dungeon. if you know what you’re getting into i think you’d have to be a little out of your mind not to pick easy mode, it seems clearly like the way the game wants to be played. on the other hand, because you never really die this way your accrual of Stuff is never interrupted, and by the time you get to the back half of the i don’t know fuckin two dozen+ story dungeons you’re just stomping around juggernauting everything
the other major part of shiren 3’s identity is that the two companions join your party semi-permanently. you can set up some basic gambits for them and equip them and also switch who you’re controlling whenever you want. there’s a hotkey to put you into turn-based control of all three of them, which you want to do against bosses (most of the interminable dozens of msq dungeons end with bosses) or just when things get hairy. on paper i was open to this but in practice it’s just a ridiculous amount of overhead, slows the game to a complete crawl, i am not surprised they only tried this shit once
(incidentally the psp port has pocket dungeons for each character i think, and i think it’s supposed to be a little snappier in general, but the only english patch has a bug that always crashes the game at some cutscene near the end??)
there’s also a unique upgrade system that i think is called dragon orbs. sometimes you get to a new floor and there’s a little ui icon indicating it’s a dragon orb floor. a couple dragon orbs will be somewhere, and every little while they’ll randomly teleport somewhere else. if you find one you can set your sword underneath it, and if the sword stays under it long enough it will start upgrading. the orbs don’t stay in place long enough on their own. you have to find a barrier scroll, usually there’s at least one on an orb floor. you read the scroll in the room with an orb, and if every square around the orb is free (and don’t worry, they’re perfectly happy to warp in next to walls whenever they want, meaning you have to wait for the next warp) it puts up a little fence around the orb, holding it in place. then you can sit your white ass down and wait for the wind to start blowing while your gear levels up. however! if you or any enemy cross the fence line the orb disappears and it’s all over. so really you pace the room defending it
i don’t know how insane that sounds, but when you’re doing it it feels totally ludicrous. to the point that i sort of admire it. these floors just start showing up a third of the way in with no tutorialization, i had to ask around to find out what the fuck was even going on. my understanding is also that they don’t show up at all in any of the postgame no-carry-in dungeons (in the business we refer to these as “the real dungeons”) so lol. i am not surprised they only tried this shit once
anyway i don’t know, tonally a lot of it is pretty compelling. the moon is a stone that sealed an evil that can only be moved by one thousand men. a princess is prophesied to become a crane in 100 years, a plum in 300, the wind in 500, and something else in 1,000, also she might be princess kaguya. there’s an eagle man who attacks you in maybe the last way you would ever guess (dual-wielding rifles). probably more importantly, once you clear the story you kind of get to start playing a real shiren game
early into it but having a much better time already. there are real dungeons, easy mode doesn’t matter anymore, i’m hanging out in a nice christian bufu the kitchen god dungeon to dig up the meat for granny’s spit potion, collecting moon rocks for the rabbits, participating in the death tournament, staying at satan’s inn…
also, game aside, it’s also a little too bad this is so underplayed because the writing can be pretty great
and here’s shiren’s dad (?) saying what @Mothra always be saying…
ok. if anyone could post about a better shiren game sometime that would be great. i leave you with some words of wisdom
